Emotion and Reason

Catalog description

Consider the range of emotions that one experiences in a lifetime, from the joy of being with your loved ones to the fear of losing them, from the thrill of success to the sadness of defeat. Pleasant or aversive, emotions play a central role in our lives. Despite their obvious importance, emotions have been considered by many philosophers to be inferior to another distinctive faculty in human beings, namely reason. The idea that emotions are primitive, irrational and dangerous and thus to be controlled and constrained by reason has been embraced by eminent thinkers from Plato and the Stoics to Kant. In this course, we will focus on the relationship between reason and emotion in moral cognition and cognition more generally, and we will investigate how/to what extent reason can be said to be distinct from and superior to emotion.